Escaping the Noise with Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan- CR108

Update: 2025-09-25

Description

These days, there’s no shortage of distractions out there with endless amounts of content that’s just a tap away on your phone. As much as social platforms like LinkedIn are really handy for sharing and receiving professional updates, they’re also places that provide endless points of unnecessary, unproductive comparison. Not allowing external voices to sway you too much in your career is half the battle in finding work that’s right for you.

In this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast, electrical engineer turned artist Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan has had to find ways to quiet the influences around her so she can focus on pursuing a career that makes her truly happy. In our conversation, we’ll discuss paying attention to what your body’s telling you, following your intuition, and finding space to reflect. In the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll discuss how I quiet career distractions.

💡 Key Career Insights

Especially when you’re young, you may pride yourself on being able to hustle and power through challenging times in your career. However, your body has a way of telling you when you’re pushing yourself too much. Pay attention to these signs of burnout and overexertion before a bigger problem arises.

Building a financial cushion provides you with the freedom to make a risky career move, so if you can put in the time, energy, and discipline into building this cushion, it enables you to move more confidently into the next stage of your career.

Don’t be too consumed with what other people think about how your career should look.

💪🏼Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about the importance of finding one way to have a quiet moment when you can be still and sort out your thoughts. I know life gets busy, and I know this isn’t easy to do, but you might be surprised by what clarity you might gain from the momentary pause.

📖 Episode Chapters

00:00:00 – Overview

00:01:07 – Introduction

00:03:47 – Chat with Sangeetha

00:48:11 – Mental Fuel®

00:54:01 – Listener Challenge

00:54:40 – Wrap Up

👤 About Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan

Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan has had to find ways to quiet the influences around her so she can focus on pursuing a career that makes her truly happy. She spent nearly two decades as an electrical engineer in semiconductor chip design before deciding to make a big change. After growing up in India, she moved to the U.S. for graduate school in electrical engineering and built a solid career designing chips, managing teams, and leading projects.

In 2024, she left her job to become a full-time outdoor oil painter, hiking into remote places to paint landscapes using sustainable, non-toxic materials. She also leads a women’s hiking group with over 1000 members in Southern California, helping others find confidence and connection in the outdoors. Her story is about choosing purpose over predictability—and having the courage to start again.

Follow Sangeetha on Instagram and LinkedIn.

👍🏻 Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know!

Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers.

Follow: Be sure to follow the Career Relaunch® podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions.

Stay in touch: Follow the Career Relaunch® podcast on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky.

💬 Comments, Suggestions, or Questions?

If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners!

Leave Joseph a Voicemail

You can also leave a comment below. Thanks!

Thanks to BrandYourself for Supporting Career Relaunch

BrandYourself offers simple tools and services to help control what people find when they Google you. To clean up, protect, and improve how you look online, visit BrandYourself.com and use promo code ‘RELAUNCH’ to get 50% off a Premium membership.

📄 Episode Transcript

[00:00:01 ] Joseph: Okay, Sangeetha. Well, thank you so much for getting up early over there in California to join me here on the Career Relaunch podcast. It is great to have you on the show.

[00:00:10 ] Sangeetha: Thank you. It’s my pleasure.

[00:00:11 ] Joseph: I would love to start by hearing a little bit about what you’re focused on right now in your career and your life, so maybe we could start with that, and then we can go back in time and talk about your pivots along the way.

[00:00:23 ] Sangeetha: As you can see in my background, that speaks volumes about what I do now. I am an artist. I’m a fine artist. That means I do these finished oil paintings. I get inspiration from the outdoors. I usually go on my outdoor expeditions as just for recreation, and I paint outdoors, and I come back to my studio and I paint them large. People want to buy them. So I, I would call it like a business, but that’s not how I intended it to be. That’s my career now, an artist who works for myself.

[00:00:57 ] Joseph: I know you got into this a little bit. You talked about oil painting, but like how would you describe your style of art and your focus as an artist? What do you like to paint? Do you have a certain theme around your art?

[00:01:09 ] Sangeetha: I would call myself a plein air landscape artist. So plein air. I think it’s a French word that means outside. So the style is that you go outdoors, you paint what you see. So you’re actually capturing the emotions, the exact feelings that you get from looking at a scene, not from a photo, but an actual scene. And you paint it. And I do those on my hiking trips. I go on to these remote trails and capture them, and I usually capture them small, like small canvases, and I bring them home. And the ones that really speak to me, I paint them large. And these are done using oil paints. And there’s several ways that you can do it. People use like plenty of colors. People use certain kinds of paints. Paint, but I do all non-toxic paints in my oil painting process. I use only four colors and it’s done in an impressionistic style, so if you look at it, it’s not a photorealistic. It’s not what you see in a photo or even like exactly how you see in the landscape. But it’s an impression of what I see. So you can bring the painter’s emotions onto the canvas. So it’s a different style of paint making.

[00:02:25 ] Joseph: That’s amazing that you’re painting with just four colors, because when I see your background, this is an audio podcast. But when I look at your background and som